Demographic

Age: 32

Gender identity: Female

Race: Caucasian 

Indigenous: n/a

Class: middle class

Other identity (e.g. linguistic, religious): Atheist 

Education: PhD

Language: English

Personal responsibilities: Married with no children

Location: relationship to Lower Mainland (from here, were from here, from elsewhere): Janice is originally from Victoria, BC but she was educated in Ontario, completing her undergraduate work at the University of Toronto and her Masters and PhD degrees at Carleton University. She now lives in Peterborough, having recently accepted an Assistant Professor position in Trent University’s Political Science Department.

Widgets: Tools & Platforms

• Flagging Harmful Language – Description-Audit
• Visualization – Gist

Brief Biography

Originally from British Columbia, Janice was educated in Ontario and has recently accepted a teaching position at Trent University. She’s interested in the personal stories of members of Indigenous and settler communities that were displaced by dams built on the Columbia River in her home province in the 1960s. Janice has experience conducting research in many different archives and can navigate basic archival descriptive tools, but she is not that conversant in archival principles or standards. Her computing skills are largely restricted to MAC OS and common wording processing applications, but she does use a few specialized apps on her iPhone.

Character description

Janice has recently accepted her academic posting at Trent University. As a British Columbian and political scientist, she’s very interested in the Columbia River damming project that displaced Indigenous and settler communities in BC’s interior in the 1960s.

Interest in archives & Life experience

Why interested in archives: Janice is studying the displacement of both indigenous and settler communities in her home province due to the creation of hyrdo-electric dams on the Columbia River in BC’s interior in the early 1960s. 

Community affiliations: Janice is a young professional, focusing on her career. Her affiliations are largely professional, and she is relatively new to Peterborough. 

Represented in archives: N/A

Professional affiliations: Janice is a member of the Canadian Political Science Association, and an associate professor in Trent University’s Political Science Department.

Access needs and mobility: Unknown

Motivations

Why: Janice is a relatively new academic and she needs to establish a publishing record in support of career advancement

Frustrations

Barriers: Janice is disappointed that she’s only been able to locate government records and not records that document details of how local communities were negatively impacted and the personal stories of those who had to leave their homes. To date, she has largely had to rely on community newspaper stories which are short in length and only include brief quotes from those forced to relocate. Janice is also disappointed that archivists on staff are not conversant in the history of the Columbia River Treaty. The archivists are generalists and can help her locate records relevant to her topic (to the extent they exist in the archives’ holdings) but cannot have more in-depth discussions on a peer-to-peer level. Janice is also conducting her research long-distance from the archives and wants remote/online access to records relevant to her research. She doesn’t have the funding to travel and visit the archives onsite. The archives is willing to digitize redcords for her and make them accessible via FTP, but this work is time consuming and she’s not getting the records in as timely a manner as she would like.

Info and Tech Access & Experience

Hardware: Janice uses a Macbook Pro

Software: Janice is comfortable using the MS Office suite of tools. She also uses a scanning app on her iPhone to capture textual records when she visits archives.

Network connectivity: Janice has home Internet and access to her university’s wifi network when working on campus 

Experience with archival tools: Janice has conducted research in provincial and federal archives. Each repository she has visited has used different access tools. She can navigate these tools, but not confidently.

Experience with archival frameworks: Janice is generally aware of how archives organize material in their care, but she is not conversant in archival terminology or metadata.

Comfort with learning technology: Janice is comfortable with mainstream technologies and even uses a few specialized apps she purchased for her iPhone. She’s never used open-source tools

Goals

What do they want to do: Janice wants to study and report on the personal stories of those displaced by the dams built on the Columbia River.

What relationship do they want to the archives: Janice is interested in governmental records that document the environmental studies and official decisions to construct dams in the 1960s, but she is mostly interested in the stories of those displaced by these dams.